When my husband told my daughter, “You don’t even realize how beautiful your figure is,” I became seriously worried for the first time. A few weeks later, during a party, I noticed him whisper something to my daughter, and the two of them walked away together. Five minutes later, I was already standing outside a locked door…

I pushed the door open.

And stopped cold.

Emily was standing in the center of the room wearing a long dark-blue dress.

But it wasn’t just any dress.

I recognized it.

It had belonged to my mother.

It was the same dress she had worn to my college graduation almost thirty years earlier.

My mother had died six years ago.

I thought the dress had been lost long ago when we moved houses.

Daniel was standing beside Emily, holding a small box.

Old photographs were spread across the table.

In one, my mother was wearing that same dress.

In another, I was eighteen years old.

And beside those was a new photo of Emily standing in almost exactly the same pose.

I couldn’t understand what I was looking at.